Neil J. RubenkingMy PC WatchdogMy PC Watchdog is high in price, long on promises, and short on delivery. There's no way to verify many of the features, and those we could test earned scores from so-so to dismal.

My PC Watchdog is high in price, long on promises, and short on delivery. There's no way to verify many of the features, and those we could test earned scores from so-so to dismal.

The website for My PC Watchdog promises much more than just antivirus protection. Among other things, this service includes unlimited online backup, system tune-up, patch management, and "dedicated engineers protecting your PC 24/7." Unfortunately, I couldn't verify most of the features, and the core antivirus didn't seem to work.

I had to look twice at the price; $19.99 per month? Not per year? Indeed, that's what it costs. The website says, "We offer one plan, because it's the only plan that works. No matter how many computers you have, My PC Watchdog will secure all of them." That makes sense. If you're going to pay almost $240 per year, it should protect all of your computers, right? But in fact, it doesn't. Despite that quote on the website, my contact at the company stated clearly that it's $19.99 per device per month.

The service pulls together security components from various sources, and its structure is designed to allow swapping in different components as better ones become available. For example, malicious URL blocking visibly relies on OpenDNS, and backup is powered by the same technology found in Total Defense Unlimited Internet Security (2015).

Getting Started You can download My PC Watchdog and use it free for a 14-day trial period. I definitely recommend running the trial before plunking down this product's substantial price.

To start, you'll create an online account. Use your password manager to generate a strong password, since anyone who accesses your account could flip through all your backed-up files. Once you've done that, the installation proceeds without requiring anything more from you.

After installation, you're prompted to log in to the online dashboard that's your main mode for interacting with the product. You can take a quick product tour if you wish. That's it. There's nothing more for you to do. No settings to configure, no need to check for updates, no worries!

Absentee Antivirus I was mildly surprised to learn that the antivirus component doesn't get installed initially. You have to wait up to 24 hours for antivirus protection. My contact explained that "these solutions are rolled out incrementally as not to disturb the user or bog their computer."

That may be so, but if I purchased an antivirus to clean up a malware problem, I think I'd like the option to scan for malware immediately after install. Even if it installed the antivirus right away, My PC Watchdog wouldn't help, as it does not perform scheduled or on-demand antivirus scanning. That omission surprised me enough that I double-checked with my contact at the company, who explained, "Our system takes proactive measures, not retroactive ones." Unless you're absolutely sure your system is free of malware, you should run a cleanup tool like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 2.0 before installing My PC Watchdog.

I waited until the antivirus came online and ran my usual malware blocking test. My PC Watchdog didn't do a single thing to prevent installation of any of my samples. It even let a ransomware sample take over the system. These samples aren't brand-new or unknown. In fact, Avast Pro Antivirus 2016 detected 100 percent of them. Avast and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2016 both scored 9.3 of 10 possible points in this test, while My PC Watchdog earned a big fat zero.

None of the independent testing labs that I follow include My PC Watchdog in their tests. I can't even get a rough idea by looking at results for the licensed antivirus engine, because My PC Watchdog doesn't reveal just what engine is used.

I went back the product's website for another look and confirmed that it clearly promises protection against viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, and more. My contact also verified that this description is correct, but noted that "we are changing the current AV solution to an AV solution that was deemed excellent by PCMag." It definitely seems that a change is in order.

My malicious URL blocking test uses a feed of very new malware-hosting URLs kindly supplied by MRG-Effitas. I launch URLs one after another, noting whether the antivirus blocks all access to the URL, axes the malware payload, or does nothing. With help from OpenDNS, My PC Watchdog blocked 48 percent of the URLs; it didn't wipe out any files during or after download.

Tepid Phishing Protection Products that excel at phishing protection typically take a two-pronged approach. Naturally they block any fraudulent websites that have been reported and blacklisted. But they also perform real-time analysis to unmask phishing sites too new to be on the blacklist. My PC Watchdog clearly lacks this second layer of phishing detection.

To test antiphishing, I scrape data from a number of phishing-oriented websites, looking for URLs that have been reported as fraudulent but not yet analyzed and blacklisted. I launch each in five browsers, one protected by the product under testing, one by Norton, and one apiece by the built-in protection in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

My PC Watch dog did manage to fend off a few frauds, but its score overall was among the lowest I've seen. Its detection rate was a full 81 percentage points lower than Norton's, and 71 percent lower than Chrome's built-in protection. Firefox and IE also did better than My PC Watchdog.

I did find that after the malicious URL blocking test and antiphishing test the online dashboard's list of Recent Domain Blocks ballooned to over 500 entries. It identified almost all of them as Enterprise Malware, with a few instances of other types, including Enterprise Malware Phishing and Drive-by Downloads/Exploits.

Background Backup As noted, the backup component is a licensed edition of Total Defense Online Backup. However, where Total Defense offers a vast number of settings and options, My PC Watchdog is completely hands-free. Once you've installed the service, it starts backing up what it determines to be your essential files in the background. You can check backup status from the dashboard, or click a button to access your files online, but that's the extent of your interaction.

The online backup dashboard, separate from the main dashboard, gives an overview of recent backup events and lets you access your cloud-stored files. You can navigate awkwardly through the folder tree, or search for the file you want.

There's no file-restore mechanism as such. You simply download the desired file or folder. If you choose a folder, you get it in the form of a zip archive. You can also share any file or folder via email. You can't specify an expiration date for the link or protect it with a password the way you can with Norton. However, you can unshare that link at a later time.

Unlimited online backup sounds expensive. I wondered if this feature was the cause of My PC Watchdog's high price. However, I found that CrashPlan and SOS Online Backup, both PCMag Editors' Choice services, offer unlimited backup storage for $59.99 per year and $79.99 per year respectively.

Bonus Features At the top of the online dashboard you'll find statistics about the number of OS updates, program updates, threats blocked, and security updates. All of the updates take place in the background, without your intervention. There isn't even a list or log of what got updated; you'll just have to take the program's word for those stats. The same is true of performance tuning. You just have to hope that whatever it did actually helped.

The dashboard includes a list of system information that can be useful. You probably know how much RAM you have, and your processor type, but do you have your system's serial number handy? How about your IP address? There are other ways to get this information, but having it one place is handy.

I wasn't impressed by the simple pie chart of free disk space. I can get that chart from Windows, after all. But My PC Watchdog does something I haven't seen in any other product. It digs into your system and retrieves the product keys for Windows and popular applications. That can be very handy if you're forced to reinstall.

Trust Me!Reading the glowing description on My PC Watchdog's website, you get the impression it will totally take care of your system's performance and security. The problem is, you have no real way to verify that many of its features working—you just have to take them on faith. The components that I did manage to test earned scores from mediocre to abominable. And its price, almost $240 per device per year, is astronomical compared to proven competitors in this field. This service could potentially improve by taking advantage of its modular structure to swap in a better antivirus. Even then, I'd want to see more transparency, some way for the user to verify that it's doing its job.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2016, Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2016), and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015) all cost about $40 per year, a fraction of My PC Watchdog's price. McAfee AntiVirus Plus (2016) costs about $60 per year, but it protects all your devices. Any of these Editors' Choice products would be a better (and cheaper) solution than My PC Watchdog in its current form.

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About the Author

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted b... See Full Bio

My PC Watchdog

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